Love.
All that has been written in song, or told in story, of love and its effects, falls far short of its reality. Its evils and its blessings, its impotence and its power, its sin and its holiness, its weakness and its strength, will continue the theme of nature and of art, until the great pulse of the universe is stilled. Arising from the depths of misery, descending from heaven the most direct and evident manifestation of a divine and self-sacrificing spirit, it is at once the tyrant and the slave. Happier as the latter than as the former, for the perfection of love is obedience; the power of obeying what we love is, at all events, the perfection of a woman’s happiness.